Garland moves 3 Million pair of ECCO footwear a year

COMPANIES | Per year, it receives around 32 thousand footwear pallets

The Portuguese company is one of the few external operators to develop logistics activities for ECCO worldwide, moving, annually, around three million pairs of the Danish brand footwear.

The Portuguese factory of the world's leading brand in the manufacture and marketing of footwear with direct injection technology, located in São João de Ver, is one of the few from the group that delivers logistics operations to a specialized external company, in this case Garland. The pilot experience started in 2013 and currently Garland moves the correspondent of 15% of the annual sales of the footwear multinational. ECCO is on the podium of the three largest customers of Garland Logistics – the company from the Portuguese Group with more than 240 years - occupying a very significant part of the warehouse of the Logistics Center of Maia II.

Apart from Portugal - where it opened, for the first time in 1984, closed in 2009 to reopen in 2012, being the oldest -, ECCO has five more factories: in China, Indonesia, Slovakia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Garland assures the entire Outbound Logistics process of ECCO Portugal. Every year, it receives around 32,000 footwear pallets from the São João de Ver factory. Shoes are stored and targeted for added value services (unit control through bar code, aiming the guarantee of the total reliability of the order, and various customizations through labelling), and are then entirely shipped to stores around the world. It should be noted that ECCO sells its products in its own stores (2,200) and shop-in shops in more than 14,000 points of sale in 90 countries. For this reason, ECCO has very high standards for the level of logistic service provided, which gives Garland the need to allocate dedicated resources and in permanent communication and team work with the client, in order to guarantee the logistic performances necessary for the business.

"The proximity of Portugal to the key European markets is, for ECCO, increasingly important. For this reason, when ECCO reopened in São João de Ver, in 2012, the multinational immediately understood the Outsourcing Logistics opportunities in view of the increase of competitiveness of the markets. Therefore, it was established the first contact with Garland, which hopefully has resulted in the construction of a solid partnership that continues until now and we have confidence that it will develop even more in the future ", explains Ricardo Sousa Costa, administrator of the Garland Group, responsible for the Logistics business unit.

"At the time it was drafted the ECCO Portugal Supply Chain strategy, in 2012, we chose to have internally a strong team in specific competencies for footwear production - purchasing, planning and management of international logistics -, and we tried to find specialized companies in other areas with whom it would be possible to develop partnership work. Having this orientation in mind, we carried out a selection process for a logistic operator that could carry out our operation of storage and distribution of footwear produced in Portugal for our clients that are spread all over the world. In this specific case, the outsourcing solution allows us a better response to the strong seasonality of the business, greater flexibility in the variability of the operations to be performed, namely value-added services for customers, as well as the reduction of initial investment in facilities and equipments", explained Rui Pinto, Supply Chain Director of ECCO.

According to the responsible, among the various proposals evaluated, the Garland’s was "the one that gave us the most confidence to be able to perform the service with the complexity and level of demand that we wanted. And fortunately, that confidence has been well deserved because, despite the natural 'birth pains' that always occur when we start a project with this dimension, we quickly stand to achieve our goals. It has been five years since our collaboration began and, during this time, we were able to together find solutions which allowed us to improve the efficiency of operations. Nevertheless, we have always been able to find answers to new requirements that have emerged. It is worth to note the commitment of Garland and its employees to ECCO, and when we evaluate this partnership, it has to be considered highly positive", Rui Pinto concludes.